"Flounder, flounder in the sea,
Prythee quickly come to me!
For my wife, Dame Isabel,
Wants strange things I scarce dare tell."
"And what does she want now?" asks the flounder.
"Oh, she wants to vote now," says the fisherman.
"Go home, and you shall find her with the ballot," sighs the flounder. "But has n't she Dustless-Dusters enough already?"
It would seem so. But once having got Adam, who can blame her for wanting an apple tree besides, or the ballot?
'T is no use to forbid her. Yes, she has you, but—but Eve had Adam, too, another perfect man! Don't forbid her, for she will have it anyhow. It may not turn out to be all that she thinks it is. But did you turn out to be all that she thought you were? She will have a bite of this new apple if she has to disobey, and die for it, because such disobedience and death are in answer to a higher command, and to a larger life from within. Eve's discovery that Adam was cheese-cloth, and her reaching out for something better, did not, as Satan promised, make us as God; but it did make us different from all the other animals in the Garden, placing us even above the angels,—so far above, as to bring us, apparently, by a new and divine descent, into Eden.
The hope of the race is in Eve,—in her making the best she can of Adam; in her clear understanding of his lame logic,—that her imperfections added to his perfections make the perfect Perfection; and in her reaching out beyond Adam for something more—for the ballot now.
If there is growth, if there is hope, if there is continuance, if there is immortality for the race and for the soul, it is to be found in this sure faith in the Ultimate, the Perfect, in this certain disappointment every time we think we have it; and in this abiding conviction that we are about to bring it home. But let a man settle down on perfection as a present possession, and that man is as good as dead already—even religiously dead, if he has possession of a perfect Salvation.
Now, "Sister Smith" claimed to possess Perfection—a perfect infallible book of revelations in her King James Version of the Scriptures, and she claimed to have lived by it, too, for eighty years. I was fresh from the theological school, and this was my first "charge." This was my first meal, too, in this new charge, at the home of one of the official brethren, with whom Sister Smith lived.
There was an ominous silence at the table for which I could hardly account—unless it had to do with the one empty chair. Then Sister Smith appeared and took the chair. The silence deepened. Then Sister Smith began to speak and everybody stopped eating. Brother Jones laid down his knife, Sister Jones dropped her hands into her lap until the thing should be over. Leaning far forward toward me across the table, her steady gray eyes boring through me, her long bony finger pointing beyond me into eternity, Sister Smith began with spaced and measured words:—